e idea that it was the work of man.

As to the deposit--Tertiary coal.

Composition--iron, carbon, and a small quantity of nickel.

It has the pitted surface that is supposed by the faithful to be
characteristic of meteorites.

For a full account of this subject, see _Comptes Rendus_, 103-702. The
scientists who examined it could reach no agreement. They bifurcated:
then a compromise was suggested; but the compromise is a product of
disregard:

That it was of true meteoritic material, and had not been shaped by man;

That it was not of true meteoritic material, but telluric iron that had
been shaped by man:

That it was true meteoritic material that had fallen from the sky, but
had been shaped by man, after its fall.

The data, one or more of which must be disregarded by each of these
three explanations, are: "true meteoritic material" and surface markings
of meteorites; geometric form; presence in an ancient deposit; material
as hard as steel; absence upon this earth, in Tertiary times, of men who
could work in material as hard as steel. It is said that, though of
"true meteoritic material," this object is virtually a steel object.

St. Augustine, with his orthodoxy, was never in--well, very much
worse--difficulties than are the faithful here. By due disregard of a
datum or so, our own acceptance that it was a steel object that had
fallen from the sky to this earth, in Tertiary times, is not forced upon
one. We offer ours as the only synthetic expression. For instance, in
_Science Gossip_, 1887-58, it is described as a meteorite: in this
account there is nothing alarming to the pious, because, though
everything else is told, its geometric form is not mentioned.

It's a cube. There is a deep incision all around it. Of its faces, two
that are opposite are rounded.

Though I accept that our own expression can only rather approximate to
Truth, by the wideness of its inclusions, and because it seems, of four
attempts, to represent the only complete synthesis, and can be nullified
or greatly modified by data that we, too, have somewhere disregarded,
the only means of nullification that I can think of would be
demonstration that this object is a mass of iron pyrites, which
sometimes forms geometrically. But the analysis mentions not a trace of
sulphur. Of course our weakness, or impositiveness, lies in that, by
anyone to whom it would be agreeable to find sulphur in this thing,
sulphur would be found in it--by ou